


Standing on a Tightrope

by Deannie



Series: Women on the Border [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7687072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cisco lay on his side, facing her. His eyes were open and staring and just starting to dry out and cloud over. Blood pooled under his chest from where something big—fist-sized—had drilled through and… She couldn’t be sure what was removed, but anything there would mean massive, fatal, excruciating blood loss…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing on a Tightrope

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during the first season, before everything got complicated :).

Caitlin shook uncontrollably, staring at the room around her. The bodies around her.

Cisco lay on his side, facing her. His eyes were open and staring and just starting to dry out and cloud over. Blood pooled under his chest from where something big—fist-sized—had drilled through and… She couldn’t be sure what was removed, but anything there would mean massive, fatal, excruciating blood loss…

Dr. Wells was beyond him, his wheelchair sparking and half destroyed, the back of his skull split by some other fist-sized something. He was reaching out, even in death, as if to stop the slaughter.

Detective West, Barry’s guardian, lay on top of another body—Iris, maybe? God, she hoped not—dead like the others. All dead…

Barry… Barry was there too. Cait tried to move toward him but couldn’t, frozen in shock. Barry was… whoever had gotten to him, they’d hit him hard enough and often enough to make sure that even a man with his ability to heal wouldn’t be able to.

Beyond him was another body, the sight of which finally got her moving.

“Ronnie,” she whimpered. His back was to her, but it wasn’t like she wouldn’t know him anywhere. She fell to her knees and reached forward to turn him over, the state of her hand causing her to freeze in the act, though she’d started him moving and he continued to roll toward her as she stared.

At her hands.

At the blood, the… oh God!

“Caitlin!”

Startled by the voice, Cait looked past the gore on her hands to look at Ronnie, though he was beyond speaking. Oh, Ronnie… He was dead, too. Murdered. His head stove in, his chest collapsed. They were all dead.

“Caitlin! Can you hear me?”

A hand touched her face and she jerked away from the warmth. She didn’t deserve that. Her eyes were locked onto her hands. Her bloody, horrible—

Red hands covered hers. Not blood, though. Red cloth impregnated with flame retardant. She tried to look over at Barry’s mauled body, but one of those red-clad hands held her face and forced it up, wiping away sticky strands of something.

“Caitlin, we need to get out of here.” Barry was there and alive and holding her chin and alive… “Are you with me?”

“I…” She thought about it, dragging her mental processes through a web of treacle. “Yes?” she ventured.

“Kilman had her trapped in his web,” Barry was saying, but not to her. “No, Cisco, I’m not calling him the Mindspider.”

 _Mindspider?_ Caitlin looked around and the bodies were gone. The warehouse around her was empty…

“Look, I’ll drop Caitlin off at the lab and track him down.” Barry looked down at her. “Hold on, Cait,” he said gently. “I’ll get you home.”

And then she was moving very, very fast.

*********

“Caitlin?”

Cait turned to see Dr. Wells rolling into the room, his wheelchair whole and unmarred, his skull reassuringly intact.

“Hi,” she ventured, at a loss for anything else to say. It had been 48 hours since she had been kidnapped by Myron Kilman—Cisco (also alive) still insisted on calling him Mindspider, thanks to the metahuman’s telepathic web. She’d been caught in that web for less than six hours, but the repercussions just kept going.

“We’re worried about you, Caitlin,” he told her candidly. “If you need to talk about what happened…?”

She snorted. How do you talk about something like that? Where you slaughtered your friends? Your fiance? And why bother talking at all when everyone is telling you it wasn’t real?

“It’s like I’m… standing on this ledge?” she tried finally. “Or a tightrope, maybe? On one side is reality and on the other… Everyone is dead.” She smiled at him hopelessly. “I can’t decide which side is real.” The laugh she heard issue from her own throat wasn’t stable in the least. “On the border of sanity without a visa.” Hadn’t Cisco said that once?

Dr. Wells rolled up to her. “You know which side is real, Caitlin,” he told her, a certainty in his voice that she was lacking. “You’re home now. _This_ is real. Us. Your friends.”

Cisco made too much noise walking into the room, as usual, and Caitlin took in the worried, awkward look on his face. Barry was behind him, looking supportive.

They were real. Right?

“I… saw Ronnie,” she blurted out, not sure why she said it. “I… I'd killed him.” She chuckled painfully. She kind of had, hadn't she? So what else could she say?

“Kilman took his victims’ fears, their doubts, and used those against them.” Dr. Wells was close enough to touch her and Cait blessed him for not doing it. She was pretty certain she’d break into pieces if he did. “You didn’t kill Ronnie,” he told her, his voice ringing in truth. “And you wouldn’t fail us.”

“We trust you,” Cisco said. He grinned, and she thrilled a little at the way he could see the upside in anything. “Even if you don’t.”

Her gaze rose to Barry’s face and he gave her that little boy smirk. “Hey, I’d be dead for real if it wasn’t for you,” he reminded her. “At least a couple of times.” He locked eyes with her and it was like he was trying to give her his faith. “Caitlin, trust _us,_ okay?”

Cait exhaled—for what felt like the first time since she’d caught that glimpse of her blood-covered hands in Kilman’s telepathic nightmare.

“I could do that,” she said.

She could always trust her team, right?

*******  
the end

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for the hc-bingo prompt: telepathic trauma.


End file.
